Concordance 9,102.44, Amendment Delta

Concordance 9,102.44, Amendment Delta is the instrument by which Concordance 9,102.44 revised the schedule of witnessed instruments governing materials entering the Lower Reading Rooms during the period of the Paper Shortage. It was issued from the Fourth Scriptorium in the eleventh aperture of the 7th Spiral and carries the seal of the Office of Marginal Correction, an office whose seal is not otherwise recognized outside its own returns. The amendment is eleven clauses long. Nine of them concern paper.

The amendment is chiefly remembered for its second clause, which established the so-called Quiet Floor for instruments awaiting reconciliation, and for the protracted dispute over whether the Quiet Floor is a floor at all.

Provisions

Clause 1 fixes the point of application: any instrument presented at a witnessed gate after the sounding of the fourth bell. Clause 2 establishes a holding area, the Quiet Floor, in which instruments presented under clause 1 are kept until reconciled. Clause 3 forbids the removal of instruments from the Quiet Floor by any officer below the grade of Reconciling Clerk, a grade created by the amendment itself and staffed, at the time of issue, by four persons.

Clauses 4 through 7 apportion paper allowances by weight rather than by sheet count, a departure from the Fifth Concordance Annex Delta and the source of most subsequent litigation. Clause 8 provides for the return of unused allowances. Clause 9 provides that clause 8 shall not be construed as encouraging return. Clauses 10 and 11 are procedural, and clause 11 repeals clause 10.

"No instrument shall be weighed twice, nor on two scales, nor by two hands upon one scale."

— Concordance 9,102.44, Amendment Delta, Clause 6

The Quiet Floor and the numbering dispute

The amendment assigns the Quiet Floor the designation Floor 9,102.44-D, which is not a number in the form used elsewhere in the Tower and has been defended on that ground. The Bureau of Floor Designation has declined four times to enter 9,102.44-D in the register, on the reasoning that a floor designation containing a decimal denotes a landing, and that landings are not catalogued. The Delta Council has held, without recorded dissent and without recorded reasoning, that the Quiet Floor is a floor for the purposes of the amendment and a landing for all other purposes.

Visitors are advised that the Quiet Floor is entered from the north stair and left by the south stair, and that the two are not connected. The Fourth Scriptorium has maintained this arrangement since the amendment's issue and describes it in its returns as "convenient."

The weighing dispute of the 7th Spiral

In the winter of the 7th Spiral, a Reconciling Clerk named Ovret Sanstable returned a consignment of instruments to the eastern terminus of Annex Delta Place on the ground that they had been weighed twice by two hands upon one scale, contrary to clause 6, and were therefore invalid. The consignment comprised some four hundred instruments relating to the Movement of Stacks, among them three recensions of Seventh Concordance, Amendment Delta.

The Office of Marginal Correction upheld Sanstable. The Delta Council reversed the office. The Third Scriptorium, asked to arbitrate, declined on the ground that the instruments had been sealed by the Fourth, and that a scriptorium does not sit in judgment on a seal it has not issued. The instruments were eventually re-admitted under the Twelfth Concordance Annex Delta, which holds that a document amended at the Middle Bench rather than at the reconciliation desk does not retain its force if the amendment was witnessed — a holding that, applied to the Sanstable consignment, restored the instruments while confirming that they had never been valid. Both parties claimed the outcome.

Sanstable was reassigned to the Upper Deeps in the following aperture and is not recorded thereafter.

Relation to the Delta instruments

The amendment is frequently cited alongside Concordance 44 and its annexes, though the two do not address one another. Its clause 5 borrows the phrase "neutral dissolution" from the Fifth Concordance, Amendment Delta, without adopting that amendment's one-fiscal-cycle limit; the Office of Marginal Correction has read the borrowing as ornamental. Its clause 2 is the basis of a claim, advanced by the Bureau of Floor Designation and rejected by the Delta Council, that the Quiet Floor falls within the antechamber beyond the witness-gate and is therefore governed by Seventh Concordance, Amendment Delta rather than by the amendment that created it.

Concordance Amendment 442 is sometimes adduced in support of the amendment's paper schedule. It is not relevant. The Fourth Scriptorium has said so twice.

Inventory

The returns of the Quiet Floor for the eleventh aperture of the 7th Spiral record the following holdings, in the order the office listed them:

• Instruments awaiting reconciliation: 1,204
• Instruments reconciled but not removed: 1,204
• Scales, serviceable: 3
• Scales, unserviceable, retained for the purposes of clause 6: 41
• Chairs: none since the incident

Status

Concordance 9,102.44, Amendment Delta has been amended six times and read, by the Fourth Scriptorium's own count, twice. It remains in force on the Quiet Floor, where it is posted at both stairs, and is considered superseded everywhere else by an instrument the Office of Marginal Correction has not been able to identify.